Ian Skerrett's blog

For the last 3 years we have been tracking the trends of the IoT developer community through the IoT Developer Survey [2015] [2016]. Today, we released the third edition of the IoT Developer Survey 2017. As in previous years, the report provides some interesting insights into what IoT developers are thinking and using to build IoT solutions.

Last week we launched a survey to solicit opinions about open source foundations and the general Eclipse community. A key thing we hope to accomplish with this survey is to gauge how people perceive the Eclipse brand? The Eclipse community has substantially grown and change over the last number of years, so we really want to know how people answer the question ‘What is Eclipse?’

Tim O’Reilly use to talk a lot about encouraging people to ‘Work on stuff that matters‘. Unfortunately, the IoT industry is often not the best example of this principle. The twitter feed ‘Internet of Shit‘ chronicles IoT solutions that should never have been built. For IoT to be successful we need more example of how IoT can make substantial and meaningful change in our lives.

2016 has been an incredible year for the IoT industry and the pace of innovation looks like it will accelerate in 2017. Last week I participated in a webinar, organized by Canonical, on the IoT trends to watch in 2017. It was a really good discussion, so feel free to listen to the recording. I think it would also be interesting to summarize some of the 2017 trends I see in the IoT industry and specifically in the Eclipse IoT community.

Today we announced a collaboration between Bosch, Red Hat and Eurotech to begin the work to create interoperable IoT components for an IoT cloud platform. This is the first step towards creating an open source IoT cloud platform that I hope one day will become the defacto implementation for IoT solutions, similar to Apache http for web applications.

The Eclipse IoT community has grown considerably over the last 12 months. More importantly we have expanded the breadth of technology to include software that runs on devices, at the edge and the cloud. We have also learnt a lot about the software functionality required to build an IoT solution.

Donations are an important way for our Eclipse users to give back, and to support our open source community. Last September, we announced that all donations to the Friends of Eclipse program would be invested in the Eclipse platform development.

One of my favourite IoT events is the Thingmonk conference produced by Redmonk. The speakers and attendees are always amazing and provide great insight into the IoT community in the UK and Europe. This year the speaker line-up for Thingmonk is looking awesome so I expect to learn lots again this year.